face to face

Here's J's birthday party. Two of her daughters were there through the magic of Skype. So they had to supply their own slices of cake, as they're down in the far South West.

When I first had a place of my own (room in shared flat in Portsmouth, £7 a week) there was no phone in the house; there were phone boxes a few hundred yards in either direction, though. And hardly any of my friends had phones, so when I went off to sea I wrote letters and so did they. Once, the Christmas post missed me in Den Helder and chased me around the North Sea for a while, finally catching up with me in Aberdeen in April.

I'm slowly getting up to speed with social networking sites. I've recently reconnected with a bunch of chaps I worked with on Karen Bravo, a seismic survey ship, when I first ran away to sea. It's nice catching up with them again, and a feeling akin to re-entering the crew mess after being on leave for a few weeks; a casual but friendly greeting and an exchange of jokey pleasantries. But in this case the gap has been over twenty five years.

of course there were only black and white photographs in those days

There's a reunion being planned in the spring, so...

Meantime, as my Facebook friends list increases, I have started seeing postings on those friends' pages from people in my family whom I no longer have any contact with. In the welsh chapel sense, that is. (Old welsh joke; every village has to have two chapels; the one you go to, and the one you don't go to). So they and I comment without acknowledging each other. Funny business. I guess that in netiquette, blanking people is as unremarkable as the Big Casual.